Driving overseas can create headaches as you acclimate to the local customs and practices over the brief time. We asked our readers to share their worst experiences behind the wheel in a foreign country. Surprisingly, a large amount of comments involved Germany, but it wasn’t entirely about the autobahn. Without further ado, here are the rental car scams, bridge collapses and out-of-hand traffic:
I’m sure that the Transfăgărășan highway is a glorious experience... when driving through on a sunny day, in a super car, while the road is closed for you to do a TV shoot. Our experience was quite different. Clapped out Lada 1200, foggy, damp road, dodging trucks up and down. If you are from Europe, you don’t have to travel to Bolivia to experience the Death Road, you have one right there in Romania.
Submitted by: towman
I was in Casablanca for business and we had to take a taxi to our meeting. We hailed on the “Little Taxi’s” and made the mistake of telling the guy that we were late.
He proceeded to wind that little Fiat to the redline. Used sidewalks. He did his damned to get us there on time.
Afterwards, I realized that the Moroccans don’t have the same respect for a clock that North America does.
Submitted by: canucksalaryman-hates-kinja
Driving on the German Autobahn and seeing cars flying past at well over 100mph, which is fine if they are German, but you see a car with British plates on it doing that and you can see from the driving style that the English idiot driving it has no experience of driving at that speed and is just white knuckling it. It is kinda terrifying, cause you can see they are only barely in control and right at the edge, or beyond, of their competence.
I’ve seen it many times over the years on my trips to Germany. There is just something about the English on the Autobahn. They treat it as a racetrack, the Germans just treat it like a fast road.
Submitted by: skeffles
Perhaps not a horror story, but I found the autobahn extremely disappointing. I wasn’t expecting a race track (I went to the Nurburgring for that) and have enough track experience that the lack of speed limits wasn’t that exciting in and of itself. But I was expecting a fast/efficient driving experience where I could use the lack of speed limits and our rented Mercedes E-class to make good time.
The reality was that you could blast to 120mph for about 10 minutes and then hit road construction and/or traffic that forced you to putter along at 30 mph. If you were near even a moderately populated area, the speed limit was lower than it would be in the U.S. on a similar road (and very strictly enforced). There was one complete stop on both lanes that lasted for half an hour over what appeared to be a minor fender bender. Overall, it was significantly slower going with less predictability of arrival times than the U.S. interstates.
Oh, and the E-class was good for the autobahn, but was a nightmare to park in any urban area. Returning it to the designated spot was a white-knuckle experience through a tight parking garage and involved a 10-point turn to get into a spot with about 2 inches of clearance on either side and an escape out the window because the door wouldn’t open.
Submitted by: golfball
Recent horror story fresh off my mind. Went to pick up my rental car at the Copenhagen Denmark airport, a Fiat 500e. Turns out they were out of 500e’s, so they gave me a Renault Zoe, “it’s equivalent!”, they said. Which I was definitely sad about, since some of you know me as the guy building the “Angry Egg” Fiat 500 Abarth rally car. But that wasn’t the real problem.
An hour into our cross-country journey, this thing’s tiny little battery was already thirsty. Used the in-car navigation to route to a charger. Upon arrival and with the help of a local, found out that the Zoe does not have fast charging! Called the rental company to see if there was a nearby location we could swap cars with, and they basically said tough luck, sucker. Had to use other charging apps to find a level-2 charger and had to ditch the car in some random hotel parking lot for two hours to charge.
I was expecting that any rental car would have CCS level-3 charging. The Fiat 500e for example charges 20-80% in 30 minutes, which is what I’m used to driving my own household’s EVs back int the states. It’s dumb stuff like this that makes the uninformed think that all EVs are like this, and rental company’s faults for helping to perpetuate it but even having crap like this in their fleets in the first place.
Submitted by: StalePhish
Highway 1, about 30 kilometers outside of Kandahar.
The locals disapproved of our presence and informed us using their localized form of customs and diplomacy.
Submitted by: Half Man Half Bear Half Pig
1992 me and 2 buddies are going to do 10days in Europe starting in Munich, then through Austria, Italy, back up to Berlin and return in Munich. I’ve driven in Europe a lot prior so no worries really. Initially good start when picking up my rental instead of the Opel / Vauxhall Cavalier I got a Lancia Delta HF Turbo. A bit smaller than the Cavalier but alot better car. Woo hoo!
Drive away and have a grand ole time on our 10 day trip. The real issue was upon trying to return the car. I had selected a non airport location since one buddy had family in Munich. I went to return the car to where we picked it up but it literally no longer existed. It had been demolished and no cars anywhere. Now this is pre cell days so we had to find a pay phone, call the rental location who said “oh, ya, vee moved around zee corner to wheredafukStrassa..” We proceed there and are told by two cast rejects from Trainspotting that you are late with your return and must pay an extra day’s fee. I’m fuming but need them to drive us to the airport and now we’re running late so capitulate and pay.
Ultimately they got us to the airport just in time to get our flight home but of all my car travels in Europe and UK, that was my worst.
Submitted by: Monsterajr
We were trying to drop off a rental car in Madrid that we drove down from Pamplona and it was Saturday so the Hertz office was closed. The sign on the door gave an address to a drop-off location, but you know how addresses in other countries don’t make much sense because they are in different formats? That was problem number one - we typed it into the GPS (thank got for smart phones and international roaming) and it gave us an address a mile away. Great.
It was a busy major road and the point on the GPS didn’t seem to be anywhere that made sense. There was nothing around that looked like we could or should drop a car off. We drove around and around for probably 45 minutes, and off of that main road the streets were 1-ways, so to do the loop and go around was probably over a mile loop. We were confused and frustrated, and then they started closing the main road off because they were setting up for a parade. So the loop we were doing was cutoff and if we followed the detour it would have been a 1 way street going in the wrong direction. So I followed the direction of the cop that was directing traffic but there was no one around and the way we wanted to go was closed, so I took my last chance on the main road to do a u-turn and go back from where we came. He didn’t like that.
He ran to his motorcycle, chased us down, pulled us over, and told us it was a 100 euro fine for an illegal u-turn. And it needed to be paid now, or he was going to have the car towed. And it needed to be cash. We luckily had exactly 100 euros between us, and we paid him and got the printed ticket. So I have a physical ticket, but I don’t know if I actually paid it or bribed a police officer and I don’t know if there’s a warrant out for me in Spain.
All I do know if that the spot we were apparently looking for was an underground parking garage 2 stories underneath a mall, which was apparently that Hertz’s overflow lot. Took about 2 total hours to figure that out. A really terrible end to a fantastic drive to Madrid from northern Spain.
Submitted by: Bags
Driving in Thailand is utterly overwhelming. No idea how people deal with that traffic day to day, even on a motorbike I was stressed out trying not to hit other motorists.
Submitted by: James II
I’ve driven in Germany and the UAE.
Germany had two main challenges for me, since I learned the road signs before I left. Neither were autobahn related.
1. Parking. A lot of parallel parking for a kid that grew up in the burbs and still lives there that is used to diagonal parking. I still can’t parallel park worth a damn.
2. Parking part 2. You’ve finally found and parallel parked. Great. Now to remember where you parked. In the US, you can get away with “Something Stable Road” and be ok if it is White, Black or Craig’s Stable road. German smashes words together and the streets are things like “Geldstrasse” “Weldstrasse”, “Giant pile of letters with dots over them randomlystrasse” Pro-tip, if you use the last way to remember where you parked your grey hatchback, you will be really footsore before you find it.
The big problem with the UAE is speeding. They use speed cameras and the setting is 0.1 kph over. Go speeding, and you don’t get a ticket, you get one for every speed trap you run through. The highway there is boring by Kansas at night standards and there are locals that can afford the fines and get bored and go 200+ kph and it’s easy speed when they flash by because the road is laid out like the autobahn. I avoided speeding tickets, but man it was hard sometimes.
Submitted by: hoser68
Spent 2 weeks being driven around India - cities, highways and rural areas. Each kilometer was a white-knuckle moment. Here are just a few of the common sights:
- families of 4 (including infants) riding on motorcycles or scooters with no helmets
- 45mph+ roads being shared with farm animals, carts, pedestrians and scooters. Lane discipline, yielding and direction of travel varied widely.
- severely overloaded trucks
- no lane discipline on highways. People riding on or over the line for long distances.
- aggressive passing on busy 2-lane roads
My observation is, modern things like roads and driving aren’t easily compatible with cultures as old as those in India. All that stuff was plopped down within the last 100 years or less, which is a blip in time compared to the age of some cultures over there. It was surprising to not witness a single collision.
Submitted by: Stephen
We went on vacation to Italy a few years ago and the driving on the mainland in Rome was a little sketchy since traffic laws seemed more like a suggestion, but once outside of Rome and driving through Tuscany to Maranello and Florence everything was fine.
The bad experience came when we went to Sicily and rented a car in Palermo to drive across the island, visiting extremely small rural towns in the south and central parts where my family originated from, before ending in Catania. Like any good tourist we used Google Maps because I can’t read or speak Italian and had no idea where to go. In all my international travels (Iceland, Ireland, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands) it has never steered me wrong before, so I didn’t have much reason to check the suggested route. We went to the airport, picked up our Audi A3 hatchback and set off south. The main highways varied between 2-3 lanes in each direction and everything was pretty uneventful for the first 45 minutes or so as we headed to Santo Stefano Quisquina, but then the GPS directed us off the main road onto Strata Provinciale 31. It was a paved road so I didn’t think anything of it. After a couple of miles the pavement gave way to a pavement/gravel mix which I thought was a bit strange, but still, it’s not unusual for some sections to be gravel in a rural area, so on we went. That’s when we got to the right hand turn across a bridge we were supposed to take.
This is what the bridge is supposed to look like:
This is what greeted us:
At this point it says we can continue straight as an alternate route, and the road is still semi paved so we went a bit further and then the road degraded into this:
Now I should also mention we had driven out of cell service range. I could not really re-plan my route or look up the next closest actual road, but I’m smart enough to know that I don’t want to end up on one of those “dumb tourist follows GPS off a cliff” articles so I turned around and figured I’d just backtrack all the way to the highway and figure out another way.
When I got back to the bridge I noticed that the locals in the area had created a path across the river on the south side of the bridge which I couldn’t see coming from the north side:
I was able to get to the bottom of it and while the paths down and up were graded dirt, the river section was very rocky and had some water flow, but not a lot.
The moral of the story is that I can now vouch that an Audi A3 FWD hatch can do some light off-roading to cross a riverbed in a pinch.
Once across the other side was paved and we managed to complete the rest of our journey without anymore surprises.
Submitted by: beman03